


a los zorros más astutos, los atrapan con su gente

by aiineslin



Category: Narcos: Mexico (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:47:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27040714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aiineslin/pseuds/aiineslin
Summary: He knew how this would end.
Relationships: Pablo Acosta Villarreal/Mimi Webb Miller
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	a los zorros más astutos, los atrapan con su gente

**Author's Note:**

> Lyrics taken from Los Tigres Del Norte - El Zorro de Ojinaga.  
> A writing exercise that went from a couple of Mimi x Pablo lines to the monstrosity it currently is.  
> This is a product of imagination that is based on the fictional version of the characters, and the occasional real life anecdote pulled from Poppa's Drug Lord.

They call him the fox of Ojinaga, for his quickness and cunning. 

*

The cops close in on Pablo Acosta, but see, there he is - slip-sliding out of their clutches again, slick as anything, thumbing his nose at them with a laugh. (They caught him once when he was younger and wet behind his ears, and once was enough to put the fear of the system in him - legend had it that Pablo swore that he would rather die than be trapped in a jail again.)

Pablo dances between America and Mexico, the border is naught but an inked line on a useless map. The cops are his, placated with bribes - and the foolish ones who follow impractical concepts like the _law_ are weeded out with brutal efficiency. He re-channels his money back into the community, the little villages from where he first got his start and in turn they become his watching eyes and ears, primed to mislead and divert when he needs it. And Pablo sees his trade stabilise, strengthen and grow. 

Ojinaga is small and dusty and mean compared to the great cities of Ciudad de México and Ciudad Chihuahua, but she is honest and true to him - she is Pablo’s beloved pearl, a town turning on his fingertips.

*

Many many years ago, when he first got out of jail, his brother Juan brought him to a witch. 

On the drive there, he couldn't help but rib his brother a little.

“What the fuck,” Pablo had said. “No way. Don’t involve me in this shit. What if she puts a love spell on me, just because I’m so damned handsome?”

“Fuck off,” Juan had snapped, cuffing his idiot brother around the ear. “Look, she does good work. God knows you need a cleansing.” He had shot a glare at Pablo. “Jail is bad juju, carnal.”

And because Pablo knew that love could be expressed through strange (really strange, in this case) methods - he shrugged and sunk deeper into his seat. 

The witch was old and had fingers thickened with arthritis, but her actions when performing the limpia were smooth and practised. At the end of it all, she read his current situations in a cracked egg, claiming that he had many, many stresses on his shoulders and when he replied to her divinations with a snort, she had paused and looked at him.

“What’s the matter?”

“All this,” Pablo had said, and at a glare from Juan, sitting behind the witch, had stopped short - the word _bullshit_ pressing hard behind his teeth.

But the witch had grinned, and she put the egg and its remains aside. “Give me your hand.”

So he gave her his hand, even though Juan shook his head frantically behind her back. She took his hand into hers, and she looked at him with old, old eyes - and for a moment, just a short moment - a frisson ran up the length of his spine and he felt his mouth go dry.

“Pablo Acosta Villarreal,” she said his name with deliberation, rolling the syllables around her mouth, and she smiled, revealing two rows of beautifully straight teeth. “You will be very happy for many years, I think.” She dug a blunt finger into his palm, but he did not flinch, stared straight at her. Her smile widened. “It ends in violence. No quiet death for you, Pablo Acosta. But there is much happiness before then, and much success too. They will call you Mr Fox, and they will know your name in the newspapers - all the way from Ojinaga to New York. Towards the end, you will find - see, here.” She traced a small line. “She is your gold, this one. But she comes too late, much too late.” 

He pulled his hand away from her, his mouth a hard line, and later at the bar, he told Juan to never ever involve him in this hellish superstitious nonsense again. 

*

When they start calling him El Zorro, he tries to turn that name to something else. 

Maybe they can call him El Furioso. (That doesn’t work. When had he been so angry, that he lost sight of his way? When he was younger and flying high on the drink, maybe - but those days are long past. The name suits Pedro Aviles though, that toothless lion brooding in his mountains, hah.)

Maybe they can call him El Tigre. (He doesn’t even like tigers!)

Maybe El Nariz, because he _does_ have a handsome nose, in his opinion. (He scrapped that idea a few scant seconds after it sparked to its sad life in his head.) 

Names stick, and they stick hard. And all his attempts to change this slipped off like so much rainwater - and after a while, Pablo resigned himself to being called El Zorro.

*

For all his grumbling about his nickname, he kind of liked it.

Once, when he was making a trip, he had come across a fox and her kits.

They had large ears, and dark eyes, and the mother stared at him, unflinching and fearless, her kits huddled close to her side. Something had stayed his gun hand, that gun hand which had shot so many poor quails to death in the name of fast draw practice. 

Maybe because she too, was a fox, and she stared him down with her nose in the air, as if she owned the night desert. 

He had let her cross his truck’s path, and only started up when she had faded into the night.

When he _did_ lean into his name, he asked his foxes to be depicted that way - desert foxes with big eyes and bigger ears.

*

When the skinny Sinaloan came around to his ranch with Neto, Pablo had received them without much thought or care. It is all the same with these guys. New schemes, new scams, all designed to leech time and money from him without giving him much returns. His operation is grinding along nicely, blessed as it is from the powers in Ciudad Chihuahua. 

But the Sinaloan’s plans are large in scale and scope, stretching across the length of Mexico and pulling together many, many strange and difficult men - and for the first time in a long while, his interest is roused.

Pablo did not get to where he is today by being slow and short-sighted. There is an opportunity here, and a rare one indeed, one that is born from the deliberate engineering of an ambitious man instead of a coincidental collision between time and place. There is great potential for more money, _if_ the Sinaloan could pull off his OPEC bullshit without getting a bullet through his head. 

And to end the meeting on a sweet note (god, but the Sinaloan rubbed him the wrong way, with his twitchiness and dead black eyes), Neto’s nephew gave him the watch off his wrist.

“Fake as shit,” Güero says later, when the sounds of the Sinaloan’s car had receded into the distance. “Nobody is as generous as _that_.”

Pablo rolls his eyes. “Why so distrusting, Güerito?” But he looks at the watch closer, and after a short while, he says, “Ah, yes. The second hand.” He waves his arm in front of Güero, almost smacking the other man in his face. “Can you see it?”

“Don’t need to see it to know I’m right.” Güero leans away irritably, crosses his arms across his chest. “You sure about this, Pablo?”

Pablo holds his wrist up to the sun. The gold does look good against his skin. 

“I don’t trust that skinny bastard,” Pablo says at last, turning his wrist this way and that. “But Neto has been in this trade long enough. And this,” He shakes his wrist slightly, a grin curling the corners of his lips. “This is a good touch. At least his people know how to make friends.”

It is then, maybe, that he decided that it could be fun to throw his hat into the ring.

*

Pablo does not regret it for a few golden years.

For all his unlikeability, Félix Gallardo had an almost preternatural ability to corral and organise; and this ability clearly did not go unnoticed by the higher powers, with the DFS throwing their weight behind it. 

Pablo’s operation, successful as it is, saw its profits swing massively upwards. _Everybody_ profited - he built restaurants and hotels, poured money into various charities, and when he wanted a boost to his ego, drove through the streets of Ojinaga and Santa Elena, dispensing bundles of cash to those who were fearless enough to run up to him.

Maybe some things happen. 

A DFS goon kills an old-timer, saying he stiffed the DFS. Neto’s son dies, and the old man spins out. Félix Gallardo’s idiot friend set his eyes on a PRI girl, and for a moment, Pablo’s radio is overwhelmed by excited newscasters going on about an “unprecedented daring to narco escapades”, and some older, smarter, late-late-night shows talk of _forbidden love_.

Small movements, cracks spidering across the tenuous walls of the Federation - but Félix Gallardo always seems to be just ahead of a big fallout, papering these incidents over with a healthy mix of manipulation, threats and money. 

He can understand the Camarena incident. Stupid and thoughtless, but Pablo can understand the raw emotions behind the act. Who hasn’t killed a few cops in their time? 

But it is an ill move to send Rafa to the dogs, to let him be paraded in front of the cameras in his stupid, over-expensive robe, bruised and cuffed and surrounded by army goons and let the government say, “Look, look, here is a narco. We have caught one. Yes, we are doing our jobs.”

It gets worse.

Neto, too, is gone. Félix Gallardo is the last one standing in this bloody game, and when he emerges triumphant from a helicopter; his eyes are two stones of onyx, lizard-cold and bright.

And with the instincts of an old fox who has been around the block a good few times, Pablo begins to withdraw, slowly but surely from the ongoings of the Federation. 

  
  


*

Not that Félix will let him go so easily.

Amado the sweet talker is sent when Pablo drags his feet with Félix’s orders. He is the heart of his operation, after all, and his people can sense his growing irritation. There is no freedom left. 

No _romance_ , really - he is just another cog in a corporation - sending bribes on the dot to Ciudad Chihuahua, and doing paperwork to make sure everything is in order. And to salt the wounds even further, there is _more_ paperwork these days - Félix has to be cut in on his profits and he has a mean eye for numbers, and he is forever on Pablo’s tail, bitching and moaning about the progress of his projects - … There are so many names, so many people, and while the landscape has stabilised greatly, the trade has been blunted into something machinesque. 

(Some days, he stares at the desk he writes his notes and cheques on, and he can see no difference between him and a clerk in a shipping firm. Because that is what he does, when it is all boiled down to the bones, isn’t it? _Logistics_.)

“Look,” Amado says upon arrival. “I don’t want to be here any more than _you_ want me here. But let me help you with the bills.” He tilts his head, and Pablo cannot see his eyes behind the sunglasses. “I was with the DFS before I was a pilot.”

So Pablo allows Tontín to deal with the comandantes and sub-comandantes and what-have-yous, and he slows down even more. 

He doesn’t go back to drinking. His wife, Olivia, had given him enough shit for that years ago when it landed him in prison for stupid, alcohol-driven fights, and the memories of her launching a chair at him sticks well enough in his mind. But he commits to smoking marijuana with a vengeance, and now that he has stacks and stacks of cocaine in his warehouses, Pablo adds a pinch of white powder to his special cigarettes.

*

It is at a fiesta that he met _her_.

Pablo is not an uncommon sight at the zone de tolerancia.

He is almost expected to be there on weekends, to dole out his largesse in good tips and the occasional cheeky pinch on the ass to the prettier girls. 

(Not that Ojinaga’s bars have great beauties; Pablo is still unbiased enough to know that the most beautiful girls end up going to Ciudad Chihuahua, and _some_ even make the leap across the border to the bars in Presidio.)

Sometimes, fiestas are thrown in the zone de tolerancia, massive parties that spill out into the surrounding streets, in the honour of so-and-so. People needed to take their minds off things, and a fiesta is just the thing to accomplish that. Ojinaga is close enough to Texas that the gabachos will occasionally come by, and when they do - they will join the fiesta because a party knows no nationalities. 

The white girl though, is a straight-up fucking unicorn. For one, she is a woman - and the gabachos are always men. 

A vaquero is dancing with her, and it is clear that he doesn’t quite know what he is doing, from the lurching steps he leads her into and the pinch of irritation between her brows. 

“What the hell is this?” He aims the question at Marco, and Marco - laconic as ever, shrugs. 

“Eh.” Pablo prods Marco with his thumb, and Marco shifts away, expressio unchanging. “Marco.”

“Some yanqui.”

“I’m not blind yet,” mutters Pablo, but he heaves himself out of his seat to walk over to her; on the way, he grabs an unopened bottle of cola. 

It takes a while to navigate to her, because the crowd is in full swing that day, and when he reaches her - it is clear that there is a line waiting to dance with her. 

The ones who are waiting, hovering around the edges like vultures - he scatters them with a pointed stare, and when she returns to her table, she looks at him, the last man standing (or seated, as it were). To her credit, she accepts the new situation with aplomb, and plunks herself down opposite Pablo in the empty chair. 

“Let me have a drink first,” she tells him in accented Spanish. “It’s a hot day, no?”

He passes her the bottle, watches her pop it open and while she is drinking, he says in English, “I haven’t seen you around here before.”

She lowers the bottle slowly, eyes him up and Pablo returns the once-over, dragging his gaze over the length of her deliberately.

She smiles.

(Pablo thinks he has seen that smile before somewhere, a very long time ago, in a small hut that stank of herbs and other strange things - half-mocking and half-amused.)

“That’s because it’s my first time here.” She puts the cola down, and she cocks her head at him. “I’m Mimi. And you’re the guy who just chased away all my other dance buddies.”

“I am that guy, yeah.” Pablo holds out his hand. “But you can call me Pablo. Shorter to say, yeah?”

Mimi laughs, canary-bright, showing perfect beautiful teeth. 

When Pablo holds her close, far closer than he usually does in a dance - he marks her perfume, Mimi smells of lilies of the valley.

*

It is a romance that blooms very fast.

Mimi gives him a number and address, and Pablo plies her with flowers - lilies upon lilies upon lilies. He depletes the only florist in Ojinaga of her stock of lilies, and when her stock is gone - he buys lilies from the surrounding towns. 

(Once, Marco brings this up. “Aren’t lilies mourning flowers?”

“She likes them,” Pablo had retorted, and that was the end of it.)

When she tells him that giving her flowers is a waste of his money, Pablo calls her up and says, “So what do you like? Marco had a gringa once, and she liked his flowers.”

Her laugh crackles over the line. “I like it when someone helps me fix up my ranch. That’s a lot more practical than filling up my living room with half-dead lilies, yeah?”

So he drives across the border to Texas to do fix-ups at her ranch. 

The second time he does this, Olivia corners him in the living room. His youngest daughter is upstairs in her bedroom, buried in her homework - and in this both of them are at an agreement, their children are kept away from any and all of their arguments. 

She says, “This is stupid and dangerous, Pablo.”

“I don’t ever get caught.” He says, lacing up his boots. 

“They only need to get lucky once.” 

Pablo looks at her - the woman who had stayed with him through the years his ass was in jail, watched him build his operations and at times, dispensed advice and directions towards his men. 

There is nothing much left between them, but Pablo will not divorce her, because she is - after all - the mother to his children, and Mimi is just a girlfriend. 

And girlfriends come and go, but wives do not.

“I don’t ever get caught,” he repeats himself, and he stands up, brushing dust from his cuffs. “Don’t worry.” He grins at her, though the smile does not reach his eyes. “It’s not my time yet.”

  
  


*

For a while, he is able to luxuriate in the romance.

He goes to Texas as many times as twice in one week for a wanted man, and on the fifth, sixth time - Mimi says to him, “Why don’t you stay here a while, Pablo?”

So he stays, for a little while that rolls on to a few days, a week, and then a month.

Most of his men knew where he was, and they knew enough to leave him alone. He had made it clear in so many words that Mimi is to be kept away from the excesses of his operation, to stay relatively safe in her ranch. 

It is a good life, for a while. He fixes up holes in the roof, a fallen fence, even figures a way to solve the plumbing issue that had been troubling Mimi for so long. He works under the sun, Mimi brings him beer and they go riding together in the winding, dusty roads between Texas and Ojinaga - he shows her the hidden paths he used to take when he was younger, tells her of the old and new ways of bringing drugs across the border. In return, she tells him about her childhood scrapping underneath the shaded trees of her family’s orchard, the strange little facts she had picked up during her university studies and she does sketches and sketches of him.

His favourite is a loose-lined sketch done in rough charcoal; his face is turned slightly away, the sun has shaded his eyes into darkness and he is looking into the distance, a blade of grass hanging contemplatively from his lips. 

In the evenings, they put on music - rolling ballads that crackle sweet and slow over the airwaves and they dance in the living room, clinging to each other. 

“Mimi, Mimi, Mimi,” he says, and he holds her close to him, the warmth of his hand burning through the thin material of her shirt. She is sunlight, fire, soft gold in his eyes - and he stares up at her, and he brushes a knuckle along the line of her jaw. “What did I do to deserve you, huh?”

She smiles, shows her teeth and she laughs, exposing the long line of her neck and she says very simply, very lovingly, each and every syllable honey-sweet with the first flush of love. “Oh, Pablo.”

There really isn’t much to say, just kisses, kisses, kisses. 

*

And then Tontín came calling.

And everything went to shit.

*

He knew this was going to happen.

He knew it in the fear-sense deep in his belly, in the twitch of his trigger finger, in the way Mimi clung to him at night even when the days were hot.

But knowing something does not make accepting it any easier, and as he watches events unfurl to their breaking point (and maybe helps it along out of some morbid sense of self-destruction and pettiness - fuck Félix and the shitty car he rode in on) - he answers the breaking with one of his own, he leaves Olivia and his children, Mimi and her ranch, to go driving to Santa Elena in the dead of the night, fleeing from everybody and everything.

*

Cowardly, maybe.

Hah!  
Pablo calls it smart. 

Foxes do not win on their brawn, unlike dogs or wolves.

*

But dogs are numerous and many, and the spotlight is on him now. Dogs are persistent. Dogs hunt foxes for fun.

They come knocking on his door in Santa Elena with helicopters and guns, and the town fights for him, and she loses bitterly. 

They drive him and Marco to a house, and he shoots enough of them to fall back.

Marco goes rummaging through the cupboards, not stopping even when Pablo tsks irritably at him.

Still, when Marco pours out a healthy measure of cheap whiskey for them, Pablo does not say no. 

*

Night falls.

Santa Elena does not smell of the desert and wind, only gunpowder and blood.

He fancies he can smell the beginnings of sweet rot in the newly dead beneath the gunpowder.

The noises the agents make have all but blurred into the background as so much static. Once in a while, they shoot at each other.

And a new voice, cutting through the static. 

“Pablo! It’s Walt. Walt Breslin.”

*

The agent is scrawny, unlike the roided-up heroes Americans so loved in their comic books.

“Pablo, please,” he says, begs. 

In the night, the smell of gunpowder hangs thickly in the air. 

Marco hums tunelessly, just out of the range of his hearing. He spins his gun chamber, click-click, click-click and to his credit, the agent does not even look at Marco, just stares hard at Pablo.

“All you people,” Pablo says. He is sweaty, hot, burning in himself. The world quivers before his eyes, and he thinks of Mimi, her lilies and the child growing in her belly. “Fuck.”

“I can help. Let me help. Please.”

The cocaine sharpens his mind and brings to relief the emotions in the agent’s voice, and he reaches out to grip the agent’s hand tightly in his sweaty grip. No-one who is lying can sound like _that_ , the desperation is enough to convince him, the raw scrape of someone at the end of his rope. 

He thinks he can smell the sweet, cloying scent of lilies in the night, but it must be a trick of his imagination, because there is nothing here except for gunpowder, sweat and fear. 

“OK. OK.”

*

He hides behind the agent as they stumble out of the house - and what a pair they must have looked like to the police, two idiots sideways shuffling to the invisible winding line that divides Mexico from America. 

The agent is just slightly taller, and he is scrawny, whippet-thin, he holds his arms out like a fucking mother goose protecting her child and incongruously, Pablo feels laughter bubbling up in him.

What is this, huh? What is this?

Decades and decades of sweat, money, blood and bullets spent, and it all came down to _this,_ him hiding behind a fucking cop, going towards a line which he knows that will not protect him from what is to come.

Because he knows Félix, with his neat suits and dead eyes - and Félix _will_ find a way to hunt Pablo down, because this line does not exist anywhere but on a map.

And Mimi will be there with him, because Mimi is a lioness, and Mimi will stay with him because she is twenty-eight and she thinks love will conquer all, and be the armour against the evil Félix will bring to bear against them and their unborn child. 

Mimi knows evil in its abstract. But she has never come face to face with it, smelt its stink and felt its cold touch on her. For all that she says that she knew Pablo, he had shielded her from the worst of his excesses, the lengths to which his men could go in the name of money and pride. 

No. Pablo cannot, will not let her face this. 

There is laughter dying in his lungs, a sweet smell of lilies in the air, and Pablo makes his choice there and then.

*

  
  


He is the fox of Ojinaga, and he will not run from his end. 


End file.
